Local theater professor helps bring storytelling full circle

Jun. 13, 2013

Shannon Robert and her Masai guide, Dickson. / Provided

Written by

Neil Shurley

Contributor

It’s difficult to tell which part of Shannon Robert’s trip to Nairobi, Kenya, was more memorable — the baboons crossing the runway or the bedsheets in “The Wizard of Oz.”

Robert, an associate professor of theater at Clemson University, recently returned from a 10-day visit to research children’s stories as part of a grant she received in association with Clemson’s Vision 2020 initiative.

“It’s about giving Clemson a global footprint,” says Robert, “Giving our students global opportunities through service learning, international study or exposure to ideas that go beyond the Upstate. So I started thinking about what we could do in theatre.”

Inspired by the Teaching Artist program at the Warehouse Theatre, where Robert is associate artistic director, her idea was to research native stories of the Maasai, Kikuyu and Luhya tribes, then share those stories at Upstate schools.

“We’re going to create masks and make puppets,” says Robert. “Eventually we hope to be able to take these stories back to Kenya and share them with Kenyan kids. We’ll leave the puppets with them, and then they’ll be able to perform them. It will be an exchange of sorts: We’re sharing their stories with Americans, and then we’re going to give them the American twist on their stories.”

Although the main purpose of her trip was to scout possible performance venues and see which schools there might have a need for this program, she also went on a two-day safari at the 15,000 acre Naboisho Conservancy.

“I flew in on a prop plane, landed on a dirt runway,” she says. “There were baboons running across the runway and there was another guy, a Maasai, who runs around with a stick and chases animals off the runway when a plane is trying to land.”

And while she managed to get within a few feet of lions and elephants, some of her favorite moments of the trip occurred at a different venue.

“I worked with some school children from the Woodland Star School in Limuru, about an hour out of Nairobi. They did a production of “Wizard of Oz.” They were adorable,” Robert said.

She gave a lesson on color theory to the students — there are a total of 16 at the school, ranging in age from 5 to 15 — and helped them paint backdrops for the play. “A woman who worked for the school sewed a bunch of bedsheets together, and the kids painted them with tempera paint. It was very chalky. But we did it,” she said.

For Robert, the trip was about making connections.

“Stories and theater kind of erase the need for language,” she said. “The stories can unite us. Kids here will relate to them, even though it’s a story they don’t know, and they can make parallels, and talk about what stories we do have that are like this, and see that kids there are similar. This kind of thing makes the world a smaller place.”